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Some Uncomfortable Thoughts on Race

This blog post is humbling, unsettling, uncomfortable and hits a little too close to home. I’m thankful for a pastor willing to stick his neck out like this and take the stand that needs to be taken. While this article can be deemed “politically correct,” the truth is sometimes being “politically correct” is the correct thing to do! However, while this article may be appreciated in some circles, it will not be so appreciated in some of the conservative Christian circles I travel in. Sometimes we conservative Evangelicals like to think we are above racism, yet we make these claims while sitting in our all or mostly all white congregations not willing to understand the plight of people we have just deemed as thugs or hyper-sensitive people over-reacting to the sins of generations gone by…

It is too easy and not honest for whites to dismiss the charges of racial profiling from Trayvon’s family as political opportunism by disgruntled blacks. While most whites are also grieved by the death of Trayvon Martin and would not be at all unhappy if his killer were incarcerated for life as soon as it can be proven that he is guilty, they still cannot sympathize with the community rage among blacks. They are almost condescending in the way they remind the grieving black community about “due process”. The assumption, of course, is that “due process” will not fail to deliver justice (an assumption not readily shared by many blacks), so with clinical and dispassionate reservation they calmly call for a thorough investigation and fail to see how biases ingrained in their psyche have bled them of sympathy.

It is unfair to the white community to think that they want a murderer to go free. And most thoughtful blacks are not prepared to accuse whites of deliberately preferring the murderer to the innocent. However, they do suspect whites of letting the murderer go free at the expense of justice because they are unable to be just. I share this suspicion. Whites are often unable to react justly in the blink of an eye because of their latent prejudices. And this is what should scandalize all of us.

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One thought on “Some Uncomfortable Thoughts on Race”

Indeed. I think that it is difficult for the average white person to understand the way the average black person might view police and that what a “thorough investigation” or “due process” means to us may not be what it means to them because we’re so used to societal prejudices being in our favor that we fail to consider that isn’t the case for everyone. We make assumptions based on our experience, and what we need to be doing is actively seeking to understand the other perspective, particularly in cases like this where justice seems already to have run amok.